During last March’s primary to select candidates for Alabama’s next chief justice, both major parties embarrassed themselves. Disgraced former Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was removed from office for defying a court order to remove an unconstitutional Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building in 2003, defeated incumbent Chief Justice Chuck Malone to receive the Republican Party’s nomination. Meanwhile, Alabama Democrats nominated Harry Lyon, a perennial candidate who called for “public execution” of undocumented immigrants, and who was once shot in the neck after a neighbor caught Lyons pouring chocolate syrup on the neighbor’s car.

The Alabama Democratic Party plans a hearing in Birmingham on Friday to discuss the possible disqualification of Harry Lyon, currently the party’s candidate for Chief Justice, and Lyon said he believes the party will drop him from the ballot.

The body of evidence submitted in the show-cause letter includes inflammatory comments made about gays on his Facebook page, but Bradley Davidson, executive director of the Alabama Democratic Party, said Monday evening that the move was chiefly because of incidents that indicate “a lack of self-control and bizarre behavior.” . . .

In comments made on Facebook, Lyon called homosexuals and those who support same-sex marriage “an abomination of God.”

In another statement, Lyon said that “only sick and perverted persons believe in homosexuality or lesbianism, though there are a lot of them.” In another instance, Lyon, using a derogatory term for gays, asked those who believe in homosexuality to “delist” him.

Republican candidate Roy Moore has made similarly bigoted comments. In one 2002 opinion, then Chief Justice Moore even suggested that gay people should be executed. According to Moore, “[t]o disfavor practicing homosexuals in custody matters is not invidious discrimination, nor is it legislating personal morality. . . . The State carries the power of the sword, that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle.”

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